Each week, we’ll post information about the Amnesty International cases we’ll be writing letters for at Pittsburgh’s 2014 Write-a-thon and Human Rights Festival on December 8.

Jorge Lázaro Nunes dos Santos

FATHER SEEKING JUSTICE FOR HIS SONS

Two of Jorge Lázaro Nunes dos Santos’ seven children were shot to death. He has been struggling for justice ever since.

Ricardo Mattos dos Santos, a talented circus acrobat, was gunned down in January 2008 while playing soccer with his friends in the Bahia state of Brazil. Ricardo died begging for his life and insisting that he was not who the attackers were looking for. In March 2011, the public prosecutor charged three military police officers with his execution. Six years after Ricardo’s death, the case still has not gone to trial and no one has been brought to justice.

Five years later, his 19-year-old brother Enio was abducted from his home and killed. Almost nothing is known about the context of his death. In 2011, his father had applied for his inclusion in Brazil’s National Program for Children and Adolescents Threatened with Death (PPCAM). The program refused to include him, arguing that he was not at-risk.

Ricardo and Enio were young black men. Every year, thousands of young black Brazilians die in gun related homicides. Hundreds are killed by military police, death squads or militias with links to the police. In a climate of pervasive racism, impunity is the norm. Some commentators refer to this phenomenon as the “extermination” of black youth in Brazil. Now is the time to stand up and affirm that Ricardo and Enio’s lives matter.

Some Pittsburgh events hosted by some Amnesty International Pittsburgh affiliates on International Women’s Day, March 8:

Road to the US Social Forum III

Spend part of International Women’s Day with New Voices Pittsburgh, the Campus Women’s Organization of the University of Pittsburgh and others in a discussion and webcast from Philadelphia. Planners of the next US Social Forum http://www.ussocialforum.net/road-to-the-next-ussf are inviting you to reflect on how the current context of economic crisis and opportunity to challenge illegitimate and corrupt power structures impacts organizing for the next major gathering of those who believe “another world is possible, and another United States is necessary!

Read more about the evening on the flyer attached here:
http://www.ussocialforum.net/sites/default/files/National%20Plenary%20Flyer.pdf
Join the national event page and share with other activists that you know around the world who would be interested in participating:
https://www.facebook.com/events/333164690128520

Galen Tyler, Poor People’s Economic Human Rights Campaign
Tamara Shapiro, Occupy Sandy
Ethel Long-Scott, Women’s Economic Agenda Project
James Braggs and Taliba Obuya,
Project South: Institute for the Elimination of Poverty and Genocide

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Join us in celebration of International Women’s Day on Friday, March 8! This event focuses on how women have been impacted by wars. The free event will feature a screening of “The Invisible War.” The 2012 documentary film exposes sexual assault in the United States military and is nominated for Best Documentary Feature at the 85th Academy Awards.

The event also features a dramatic reading, speakers Francine Porter, Joyce Wagner, Edith Bell and Scilla Wahrhaftig and will end with a Q&A after the film.

This event is sponsored by the Thomas Merton Center, Code Pink Pittsburgh, Women’s League for International Peace and Freedom and American Friends Service Committee of PA.

We hope to see you there!

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